Marketing Firm Publishes Worthless Report on Green Social Networks

SRB Marketing’s “Green Social Networks” report fails to distinguish between blogs, portals, and social networks.

When we spotted the headline “Top 5 Green Social Networks” in the LOHAS email newsletter, it obviously piqued our interest. After all, Max Gladwell is the nexus of social media and green living. This is our beat. But when we opened the story and saw Yahoo! Green and Treehugger in the top five, we thought to ourselves, “What the hell are they smoking? Does the term ‘social network’ mean anything to them?”

Reading further into this “story”, it became clear that it was pulled from a “special report” that was written by SRB Marketing. Evidently, this “award-winning, full-service Internet marketing firm” doesn’t know the difference between a blog, a portal, and a social network. Perhaps that’s why the report has been discounted from $15 to $5. It’s clearly not worth the bandwidth to download it, so we’ll just rely on what SRB and LOHAS published.

We can agree with the premise of the report:

Green Social Networks examines the intersection of two powerful, long-term trends:

A greening economy and marketing industry, where businesses and nonprofits alike are increasingly accountable to their various constituencies, society and the environment — and eager to communicate about their responsibility efforts.

The rapid growth of social networks, and how they’re changing both our work and personal lives.

But judging from the highlights of a report that claims to contain “over 50 notable green social networks”, we’re pretty doubtful it can deliver on its promise:

Green Social Networks enables organizations of all sizes to jumpstart their social networking relationship and promotional efforts. It helps demystify social networks and identify the ones organizations can best use to reach green and curious audiences.

The setup in terms of actual social networks is compelling:

Well over half of Americans ages 15-34 are actively using online social networks (e.g., Facebook, MySpace), spending on average more than seven hours per week on such websites and driving the growth of overall time spent online.

Those 35 and over, the percentage of social network users drops, but still represents tens of millions of people. Participation in social networks continues to grow, though more slowly than in prior years, as more people seek to connect, share and collaborate with sometimes far-flung family, friends, business colleagues and other likeminded individuals online.

Today, hundreds of millions of online users have already joined at least one social network, with an increasing number belonging to more than one. About 40% of all social networkers say they use social networking sites to learn more about brands or products they like, with 28% saying that a friend has recommended a brand or product to them.

But then here are “The Top 5 Green Social Networks by Alexa Traffic Rank”:

First, LOHAS qualifies “green” in much the same way we do: “We use the term ‘green’ in its broader sense, to refer to marketing and networks oriented not only toward environmental sustainability, but to corporate social responsibility and social causes as well.” So we’re not here to split hairs about what’s green or not.

Second, since they acknowledge that Alexa does not measure subdomains, Yahoo! Green shouldn’t even be in there. It’s safe to assume that Yahoo! Green is the most visited green site, but no one outside of Yahoo! has any idea how much traffic www.green.yahoo.com gets and how that stacks up relative to others. So these numbers are irrelevant.

Next, Alexa is notoriously inaccurate unless you balance it against Compete.com. That’s our preferred method, aside from ComScore, which is a pay service, for determining site traffic and ranking. Setting aside the fact that only two out of these five can even be considered a social network, let’s take another look at the traffic ranking without Yahoo!, because we all know that Yahoo! has 500 million users, but that tells us nothing about its green-specific portal (which is lovely, by the way).

The numbers clearly change from month to month. But what’s clear is that Treehugger should have it’s rightful place as the second-most trafficked green site behind Yahoo! Green. ComScore didn’t have recent data on Care2, but its traffic has been trending down all year while Treehugger’s is up. It’s a small point to make, but SRB’s traffic data is off by enough to warrant highlighting it in demonstrating its worthlessness. This is partly because blog traffic and social networking traffic are apples and oranges in terms of a marketer’s objectives and what they need to know.

What’s more important (read: clueless) is lumping blogs (Treehugger), portals (Yahoo! Green), and a micro-lending service (Kiva) in with social networks. If these are the top five, who knows what you’ll find in the other 45?

It’s not that SRB doesn’t know what a social network is. It cites MySpace and Facebook in the setup. Look to the right sidebar of Max Gladwell and find links to other social networks, some of which are green. We’re not going to go so far as to define a social network because it is a fairly broad term. But we certainly know when something is not a social network. So should an “award-winning Internet marketing firm” that’s trying to convince clients to look to them for navigating the relatively new and often precarious landscape that is the social web.

Finally, SRB throws out some of its best practices for using social networks as a marketing medium…

There are a number of ways marketers can integrate social networks into their marketing mix. Among them are to (1) create profiles or pages, and start groups on existing social networks; (2) integrate marketing campaigns with social profiles and tools (e.g., video, podcast, fanbase); (3) associate with celebrities (though due to skepticism, there’s a need to tread cautiously here); (4) start their own social network; and (5) advertise on social networks.

Good post and good analysis highlighting the flaws of site rankings.
We ( http://www.rsitez.com ) start seeing more and more ‘green’ social networks between our customers. This is normal as social network sites offer great tools for associations and organizations to spread their messages and grow their membership.

At rSitez we are glad to contribute to their development with our white label social network software. One of our last ‘green’ customers is from New Zealand http://www.greentree-united.rsitez.com . It’s clear this phenomena is global.

I appreciate constructive criticism as much as the next guy, and I agree with your point about the basis for the rankings — they certainly could be improved and include trending.

The rest of your criticism seems a little unusual, though, seeing as how you: (1) didn’t actually read the report (I would have been happy to send you a review copy); (2) declined to define what a social network is, acknowledging that as “too broad”; and (3) didn’t contact SRB to address your concerns prior to writing such a scathing critique (was it our implication that social networks can be used as a marketing medium that got you so piqued at us — that’s really not clear to us?).

Your main beef seems to be that we included Yahoo! Green, Treehugger and Kiva as social networks.

If you look at the report, you’ll see we specify that the social networking aspects of Yahoo! Green, Treehugger and Kiva are only a part or subsection of their respective websites — that those websites aren’t dedicated social networks didn’t indicate to us that they should be excluded from a report on the subject matter. I’d really appreciate you’re letting us at least know your criteria for determining what’s *not* a social network, so we know where we went wrong.

Yes, social networks are hard to define, but they all have common components — in the case of Yahoo! Green, while it’s certainly a portal, there’s a Q&A section geared toward green living questions that require those participating to sign up and create descriptive personal profiles to ask and answer those questions, interacting with other members who also have profiles. To us, that’s a type of social networking — but we’d love to know why not if others disagree.

For Treehugger, while it’s certainly a blog, there’s a whole Interaction section, including “Forums,” where again, participants have to sign-up and create descriptive profiles to participate in the discussion. For Kiva, the social networking components are even more clear.

Hope you’re a little more “fair and balanced” than Fox News and actually permit this response to your post. I also welcome further, constructive contact and/or dialogue with you. Peace.

Rob, I just noticed/remembered you also happen to provide services that are at least somewhat competitive to those SRB provides — something that your readers would probably appreciate a note of disclosure regarding, especially when engaging in criticism.

We’re dedicated to full transparency. Which is why we also make it clear that we provide marketing consulting as one of the main menu items.

There was nothing personal about the critique. And it wasn’t exactly scathing. We simply pointed out that, based on the information provided by the SRB website and LOHAS article, the report was of little or no value.

You elected to promote the report thru editorial channels such as LOHAS and GreenBiz.com, and that’s how we found it. So while you opened it up for potential clients to find, you also opened it up to criticism. We didn’t look to criticize it. We were hoping to learn something and blog positively about the “Top 5 Green Social Networks.” As soon as we saw the list, though, it was clear something was off…and off by a lot. Only then did we learn it originated from a marketing firm. Before that, we’d never heard of SRB.

By how you’ve described Treehugger and Yahoo! Green, any interactivity qualifies a site as a social network. We have more specific criteria. Ning is a social networking platform. The basic tools or features of Ning should serve as minimum requirements for being considered a social network. Drupal is also an open-source social networking solution. Yahoo had a social network (Yahoo! 360) but shut it down. Opening a profile does not a social network make.

The link to the Earth2Tech post in a previous comment lists several other green social networks.

Another way to test whether or not the term social network is accurate is to substitute “website”. Would it change the actual meaning? Or would it make the report headline more accurate? Top 5 Green Websites. Perhaps.

Well, I’m glad you’re transparent enough to include my response, anyway. But I’m not surprised that we’re going to disagree on a handful of things here:

– I’d disagree that a menu item serves as adequate disclosure, but will let your readers decide that for themselves.

– Ning is one of many social networking platforms, and probably one of the most popular because it’s so feature-rich — why should Ning’s “basic tools or features . . . serve as minimum requirements for being considered a social network.” Can you elaborate on your reasoning here? You refer to criteria, but what exactly are they and why? It’s like some politicians critiquing a policy solution to a problem, but providing no alternatives. The profiles have descriptive and contact information – members can learn a little about others, interact and get in touch, and that’s basic social networking from my perspective.

– How can you critique or determine the value of something you haven’t read? Basing a critique on a short article excerpt — especially one where you cut out relevant parts of the information provided (the footnote at the bottom of the graphic acknowleding some sites not to be dedicated social networks) seems to be at least as “off” to me.

– Yes, all of Earth2Tech’s list is part of our larger list — I’d go as far to venture that you’d even agree that well over 90% of the 50+ sites we list are green social networks, even by your unspecified, but apparently more stringent criteria. It just so happened that we included Yahoo! Green and Treehugger as a few of those websites that aren’t dedicated social networks, because we felt that they were too large to leave out (as some would reasonably argue that they are/have social networks as part of their respective sites). We included the Google PageRanks to help supplement accuracy as well as trending.

We’re entrepreneurs who have several blogs and do some consulting. We’re hardly competition. But if that serves your defense, you’re welcome to it.

Our critique (for what it’s worth) is based solely on what we read, and we drew our conclusions based on that. To go thru it point-by-point would lead to a prohibitively long post. But it was clear to us from what was made available that one could have serious doubts about its value. If anyone would like to pay $5 to download the report and read further, they can. In fact, if you’d like to make it available to download for free, we’ll be happy to host it or link to it.

Ning is a good abstraction of a social network. This is what a social network looks like. It’s not feature rich compared to Facebook. It’s bare bones. If you contact the folks from Yahoo! Green and Treehugger and ask them if they are a social network or if they offer social networking, I’m sure you know the answer you’d get.

Here’s a good example. Mashable.com is a blog about social networking. It also offers actual social networking as a feature. But few would call it a social network. It’s a blog. That’s how they see themselves, and that’s how they represent themselves to marketers. That is their core value prop. The vast majority of their traffic comes as a result of being a blog and not for the social networking. So it would be inaccurate and misleading to characterize Mashable as a social network despite the fact that they offer it.

These distinctions are essential for understanding the social web, especially for marketers. The choice to market thru Care2 is wholly different from that of Treehugger which is different from Yahoo! Green. Lumping them together and calling them all social networks does no good, no matter what the rest of the report says. We’re sure it wasn’t intentional, but it’s misleading to anyone who doesn’t know the difference.

If Treehugger and Yahoo! Green were too large to leave out, they should have been accurately portrayed. It’s not just a matter of semantics. Marketers don’t make decisions based on how you interpret the meaning of words. They make them based on achieving objectives and ROI. They can’t do that without accurate information.

So, you can’t imagine the other 95% of the report having any value simply because it included a few sites which aren’t dedicated social networks, and that may mislead or confuse marketers?

Those sites you highlight *were* accurately portrayed with an asterisk and footnote explaining their inclusion (did you miss that?). If Yahoo! Green or Treehugger are generating 10x the traffic as the vast majority of dedicated green social networks, marketers ought to know about it — they’re smart enough to see for themselves what the primary value prop is for each site. It’s not exactly rocket science.

If any of this bothered the other social networks or experts we consulted for the report, and who reviewed a copy, they hadn’t said a word.

What’s misleading is purporting to critique something without knowing what it is you are critiquing. You missed all of the other details in the tips, case studies, etc. You have no idea what value lay there, despite your disagreement with definitions or labels. That’s a disservice to your readers and the industry.